Frank Bascombe and I go way back to 1986, the year my second son Ned was born. Frank and I first met when I read Richard Ford’s third novel The Sportswriter, a book I absolutely dug, essentially because I loved Frank’s voice, which he himself describes as “a frank, vaguely rural voice more or less like a used car salesman: a no-frills voice that hopes to uncover simple truth by a straight-on application of the facts.”  

Frank has narrated four subsequent novels: Independence Day, which won the Pulitzer, The Lay of the Land, Let Me Be Frank with You, and Be Mine, which was published earlier this year. 

Reading the first three of the Bascombe novels was like hanging out with my eloquent best friend Jake Williams, someone who can clearly perceive and then articulate how the messed-up moving parts of the human condition combine (or clash) to create, more often than not, heartache. Frank, like Jake, is stubbornly and stoically determined to remain semi-cheerful through most of its travails. Neither is a whiner; they’ve read their Aurelius. 

By most people’s standards. Frank’s life has been fraught with disappointment. His first son Ralph died of Reye Syndrome at nine, he’s been divorced twice, traded in a promising literary career for sports writing, then abandoned journalism for selling real estate. His son Paul, a troubled individual throughout his childhood, adolescence, and middle age, dies at the end of Be Mine at 47, the victim of ALS. 

Yet, unlike my experience reading the first four of the Bascombe novels, I was not sad to see the story end, not sad to be separated from the companionship that Frank afforded me, because in his old age Frank has become somewhat of a mansplainer. He’s too much of a know-it-all, too ready to diminish his fellow humans by pigeon-holing them into stereotypes. Here’s his description of one of the well-meaning greeters at the Mayo Clinic where Paul is receiving treatment:

He’s pushing a wheelchair and wearing a blue Mayo parka and a big, coffee-breath, come-on-in grin, as if he knows not only my car but everything about us. These fellows are mostly 60-ish, jowly-jovial Rotarian types with hamburger laughs, ex-military or retirees out of the sheet metal trade, who’d otherwise be home with the wife watching TV.

Here’s his take on his Mrs. Harald, who runs with her husband a motel near Sioux Falls, South Dakota:

Mrs. H seems like the best ole raw-boned gal you want to have be your cousin. But I’m willing to bet, after a couple of Crown Royals, she’ll be laying the cordwood to immigrants, ethnics, socialists, elites, one-worlders, the UN, Kofi Annan and whatnot – anyone else who fails to believe property rights outweigh human ones.

To me, on the other hand, she seems like a well-meaning Southern transplant who sympathizes with Frank and Paul and who benignly ignores Paul’s foul mouth. 

Anyway, I’m not saying that the novel is not well-plotted, rich in characterization, or worthy of Ford’s magnificent body of work. I’m only saying that Frank and I have drifted apart, a phenomenon that has happened often to him with others throughout the novels. Chances are Frank and I won’t be meeting again, not because I wouldn’t read a subsequent Bascombe novel, but because I doubt if they’ll be another. Frank seems to suffering the onset of memory issues. 

Here is the end of Be Mine.

I hear my name called. “Where are you, Frank? I’m coming. I have something you’re going to like. Something very different and new.” I turn to see who it is. The empty time I’ve missed has gone quietly closed from both sides. “Okay,” I say, “I’m ready for something different.” I smile, eager to know who is speaking to me.

Of course, I wish Frank only the best. He’s ultimately a good guy, and the pleasure of having known him far outweigh my current niggling complaints. 

Adieu, Frank.